Paima Studios, a developer of L2 frameworks, has introduced an innovative method of accessing transaction metadata directly from Cardano’s smart contracts language, Plutus. This development, known as the Aiken smart contract, allows for the extraction of metadata from the transaction hash, opening up new possibilities in areas such as NFT AMMs, on-chain gaming, and interoperability.
As Cardano continues to expand and establish a decentralized ecosystem, one major challenge has been the inability of Plutus to access transaction metadata, which has hindered the growth of NFTs and on-chain games on the network. However, Paima Studios, a firm specializing in Web3 applications, has successfully addressed this challenge.
Sebastien Guillemot, co-founder of Paima Studios, announced this breakthrough over the weekend, stating, “We managed to get a Cardano Plutus script to validate CIP25 metadata, with big implications and enabling many new use-cases, including NFT AMMs, new interoperability standards, and on-chain games. And we just open-sourced it!”
Cardano NFTs, which have gained popularity in recent times, are issued under the CIP25 token standard. This standard, similar to Ethereum’s ERC-721, defines how NFT attributes such as images, names, and URLs are defined within the transaction metadata.
Previously, Cardano developers faced the challenge of Plutus’ inability to access this metadata, limiting the utilization of NFTs on the network. Ethereum developers also encounter similar issues despite Ethereum’s more advanced nature. They typically address this challenge by using oracles or implementing complex mechanisms to link to off-chain data.
Cardano developers have attempted to solve this challenge with the introduction of a new improvement proposal, CIP68, which replaces transaction metadata with a new on-chain data system called datums. While CIP68 solved the problem, it created new challenges, such as compatibility issues with tools built on Cardano that still support the previous standard (CIP25). Additionally, CIP68 is more costly as it relies on datums, requiring twice as many UTXOs compared to the previous standard.
To overcome these challenges, Guillemot and his team at Paima Studios propose a novel approach that allows for the direct access of metadata through Plutus, regardless of the token standard. This is achieved by utilizing Plutus to access the transaction hash, which contains the desired metadata.
Under this proposal, a Plutus smart contract is equipped with the final transaction hash and verifies that the other fields match the hash. Guillemot explained the mechanics behind this approach, stating, “We built an Aiken smart contract that does exactly this: it reconstructs the transaction binary data in Aiken and checks if it matches the hash! This answers one of two questions: Is it feasible? Is it efficient/cheap enough?”
Guillemot’s team found that this new approach is significantly more cost-effective than the prevailing CIP68 standard, as it reduces the number of UTXOs required.
In the cryptocurrency market, ADA, the native token of Cardano, is currently trading at $0.3744, with a 2.36% increase in the past day. It briefly dipped to a 24-hour low of $0.3335 before experiencing a recovery.
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